Patient health records are invaluable in determining a patient's current health state and future health risk indicators. Medical information and associated records, however, are generated using complex disparate proprietary systems and stored in different locations making it difficult to access and compile. Existing systems also often provide inconsistent access to stored medical information. For example, a hospital may have many different proprietary computer systems that each separately record and maintain medical information of patients in unique proprietary formats. A medical professional can access the medical information, but only on specific computer systems in specific wards of the hospital. This often results in requests for hard copies of medical information pulled one at a time from various storage systems by a variety of personnel, causing significant wait times.
Privacy concerns and HIPAA regulations further complicate a medical professional's ability to transfer and review medical information. In existing systems, patients are often unaware of where their medical information is stored, who has access to it, how to obtain copies of it, how to provide copies to other medical professionals or how to ensure privacy of the medical information. Existing systems do not provide a full and/or consistent accounting of the use of medical information. For example, existing systems cannot indicate who accessed medical information, when the information was accessed or where it was accessed.